- Music
- 01 Jun 16
The Edinburgh hip hop trio will play at the festival on Friday evening.
Young Fathers became overnight sensations with their 2014 Mercury Music Prize win for debut album Dead. Alas, in the immediate aftermath, much of the attention centred on the Edinburgh hip-hop trio’s “whatevs” body language rather than their searing rap and innovative beats. They just didn’t look sufficiently delighted at having bagged the Mercury. The idea that they would be more invested in their music than the media hoopla was baffling to many. On the Mercury red carpet they were quintessential fish out of water.
“We weren’t nervous – AT ALL,” rhymer-in-chief Alloysious Massaquoi told Hot Press several weeks after the Mercury dust had settled and the group were prepping their second LP, White Men Are Black Men Too. “I think that was the problem. Journalists were unhappy because we didn’t jump around when we won. We had a sense of perspective – yes we won an award which is prestigious and British and all of that. We didn’t start this band to win awards.”
The big novelty was that they came from Scotland. As with Irish hip hop, the idea of Scottish people making urban music was, in the UK and further afield, deeply, annoyingly novel.
“We’ve had this battle since we were teenagers,” Massaquoi told Hot Press. “You get a strange reception, if you do what we do and you don’t come from a satellite of London. You have to put up with all this bullshit – your accent sounds funny, shouldn’t you be playing bagpipes? So much nonsense. People have the idea that [artists from Scotland] should be singer-songwriters or play guitar. It’s as if you aren’t credible doing anything else.”
Then, the three musicians have been through worse than a Twitter backlash. Massaquoi’s family is from Liberia and he lived for a spell in a refugee camp in Ghana. By the time he made his way to Edinburgh as a seven-year-old he’d seen enough for several lifetimes.
“We’ve never felt as if we fitted in,” he noted. “We are outsiders – we’ve always been outsiders. When the three of us came together and we started making music there was a sense that we weren’t supposed to be doing this. We did it anyway.”